What Are Promotional Tools in Marketing

There are many elements of marketing – but one key element is Promotional Tools. Promotional tools are the things that you use to help promote your Business.

Promotional tools are used to generate sales. They are tools that support your sales team in expanding their business by increasing the number of customers, driving extra traffic to the website, increasing the sales turnover, or even improving customer service.

Marketing Promotional Tools

For effective promotion of any product or service, there are several marketing promotional tools that can be utilized in a promotion program. These should be applied carefully according to the given circumstances. Since every promotional tool is suitable for certain circumstances.

The following are the important types of marketing promotional tools that must be in your mind.

Ways of Marketing Promotional Tools

Following are the ways of Promotional Tools in Marketing:

Advertising

The masses of customers dispersed geographically can be reached with the Promotional Tools of advertising. Actually which can be repeated several times. The popularity, size, and success of the selling organization are enhanced by large-scale advertising. Therefore the customers consider the advertising products as most legitimate due to the public nature.

Moreover, it’s the quickest way to promote a product to a large portion of diversified customers. Another important feature of advertising is that it is much more expressive. In such a way that the selling organization dramatizes its products by applying certain impressive print, sound, visuals, and colors, etc.

On the one hand, advertising is very beneficial. However, on the other hand, it has some disadvantages too. Thus the advertising cannot stimulate the customers directly, because it is impersonal.

Advertising is based on one way of communication. This means that the audience of the advertisement has not the option to give feedback or respond to the advertising messages. One of the biggest drawbacks of advertisements is that they are very expensive.

There are some types of advertising, like radio and newspaper advertising that can be utilized within a range of smaller budgets. However, the other kinds of advertising, like network television advertising, are not covered in smaller budgets, but larger budgets.

Personal Selling

At certain stages of the buying process, personal selling is the most effective promotion tool in creating customers’ preferences, convictions, and actions. In personal selling, personal interactions between two or more people take place. That can allow both parties to understand the characteristics and needs of one another. Therefore then make immediate adjustments.

All types of relationships are also flourishing in personal selling like selling relationships of the matter of fact and personal friendship etc. The salespersons have professional expertise by which they focus on the interests of the customers. Although then develop a healthy relationship over it.

Moreover, the customer also gives extra time and attention to listening to the offerings of salespersons even though his final decision is no. Personal selling is also faced with extra cost and effort in training salespersons to make them committed to the given tasks.

The advertising can be altered by continuing and discontinuing it in certain conditions. However, the size of the sales force is much harder to change in the case of personal selling.

Sales Promotion

These Promotional tools include sales promotion which further contains a broad assortment of elements like:

Coupons
Cent-off Deals
Premiums
Other Tools

The tools of sales promotion are applied to boost sagging sales by attracting the customers and offerings distinct incentives of purchase. A quick response is generated by using this promotion tool for sales promotion. If advertising is related to “buy our product” then sales promotion is the representation of “buy the product now”.

In the short run, sales promotion can be regarded as an effective promotion tool. However, in the case of the long run, it is not favorable in developing long-lasting customer relationships. Thus the brand preference is just like advertising and personal selling does.

Public Relations

Public relations are much different from the ads and they are more influential than these ads. So public relations consist of news stories, events, and features. That is considered more real. Therefore the readers also consider them more believable.

Many prospects avoid advertisements and personal selling. However, they can also be influenced by public relations. So the real message in public relations is considered to be “news” by the customers rather than as a sales-centered communication.

The product of an organization is also dramatized by public relations. Public relations should not be used too much or it should be used as an afterthought. It is combined with the elements of the other promotional mix to use it effectively and economically.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing may take the following forms.

Telemarketing
Electronic Marketing
Online Marketing
Direct Mail

Four distinct characteristics are shared in all of the above forms. The first characteristic is direct marketing, which is non-public. It means that a specific person is addressed in this form of promotion tool rather than focusing on the general public.

Furthermore, direct marketing is customized and immediate, which means that the messages can be fitted to the specific requirements of the customers and they are developing very quickly. At last, direct marketing is interactive which means that customers and Marketing may show a dialogue with each other.

The Objectives of Promotional Marketing

It’s vital to determine your promotional marketing objectives so that you can achieve your goals. There are various objectives to bring into focus:

Promotion of new products or services. It is possible to introduce new products and services to the market against existing ones — a chance to find a place in the niche.
Development of brand image. Brand image is when people associate a brand with a particular product. For instance, when you think about toothpaste, Blend-a-med and Colgate come to your mind, when you think about tires, it’s Pirelli and Bridgestone when you think about soccer — it’s Manchester United and Real Madrid. This promotion objective tends to create or restore the brand image and makes products more recognizable amongst others in the market.
Informing customers. Marketing promotion is vital for telling people about changes in products or brand’s policies. It also helps to describe the features and details of the products.
Showing superiority over competitors. Everybody uses promotion marketing these days, so to be competitive, each brand needs to apply a long-term promotional strategy.
Turning potential buyers into real customers. If promotion marketing styles like personal selling, advertising, and others are used appropriately, they stimulate demand for the produc

Promotional Marketing Strategies

Without a detailed plan for promoting your product, you risk losing money. To find the best way to put your offer in front of the right audience, consider several effective strategies.

Email marketing. Every dollar spent on email marketing brings $44 in revenue. With this channel, you can invite subscribers to your events, share news and updates, promote your products and services. Increase both customer retention and loyalty by sending transactional emails, boost sales with abandoned cart emails and post-purchase emails, improve your relationships with triggered emails. SendPulse allows marketers to send 15,000 emails each month for free.
Social media marketing. You can’t ignore such powerful channels as Facebook and Instagram. Users search for reviews from the brand’s customers, look for high-quality photos of products, and contact the brand’s representatives to find out more information. Encourage your clients to leave feedback about your product, launch targeted advertising campaigns, and create chatbots. They will help you automate answering FAQ and collect orders. With SendPulse, you can create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger at no cost.
Content marketing. It should be a part of your online marketing strategy. People adore high-quality content which helps them make a choice, answer their questions, offers expert tips. Do not miss this chance to nurture leads with valuable content. Start your brand blog if you still haven’t done this. Find out popular search terms and users’ pain points and do your best to cover them in your articles. Provide how-to guides, interviews with top specialists in your industry, and outstanding case studies.
Influencer marketing. People don’t look for brands — they look for emotions they can provide. For this reason, they trust other people more than the brand itself. You should look for thought leaders — influencers — whose opinion DOES matter for your clients. Using Instagram tags, you can find bloggers who enjoy using your product, or if you’re a start-up, offer an influencer to try your product and if they like it, let them be your brand ambassador.
Referral marketing. 92% of consumers tend to believe their friends’ recommendations rather than any advertising campaign. Word-of-mouth is the strongest promotion strategy. To encourage clients to share a word about your brand, offer a referral program. Reward them with a discount or bonuses each time a client buys using your referral link. This way, you will increase sales, customer loyalty, and brand recognition.

Choose the best strategy for your business or combine several ones for better outreach.

How do you write a promotional marketing plan?

Promotion is one of the four basic elements of marketing. The key to effective marketing promotion is a well-thought plan. Here you should outline the main objectives and techniques that will help you reach your goals, and the KPIs you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Let’s take a closer look at creating a promotional marketing plan.

Allocate budget. Analyze your current marketing budget and decide how much money you can spend on promotion. Make sure this sum is reasonable — don’t cut into product development, employee salaries, taxes, or other vital expenses. Remember that your ROI may not increase after the first promotional campaign so spend your budget wisely.
Establish your goals. You should cover both short-term objectives and long-term goals. The last one represents your global goals while short-term objectives are the steps that your team should take to reach it. To have a clear picture, consider breaking your annual goal into 6-month, quarterly, and monthly goals. This way, you can easily manage the entire process and take action on the go.
Identify your target audience. To better understand your potential clients, create your ideal customer profile. The goal is to find out where your audience is, which problems and needs they have, what your potential clients have in common, and analyze the ways to reach them. With this profile, you can segment your base and create highly targeted promotions.
Choose your strategies, techniques, and channels. Every marketing platform works best for a certain objective and offers its own effective techniques to reach them. If your goal is to increase traffic and sales, consider pay-per-click advertising and display ads. If you want to raise brand awareness and recognition, go for social media marketing and influencer marketing.
Delegate responsibilities. This will help you focus on each promotional campaign separately taking into account the peculiarities of every channel. Hire specialists in SEO, PPC, content marketing, targeting, etc. They will keep track of progress day by day and analyze the campaigns in detail.

Having this plan at hand, you can evaluate your business opportunities right now and build a step-by-step plan for successful marketing promotion.

How to do Promotional Marketing

Understand the needs of your target audience. Think about the people that you want to receive your promotions. If your promotion efforts are to the point, it will be easier to get your point across to your audience.
Decide which marketing channels to use. Define the most suitable channels to accomplish your goals. For example, SMS marketing is right for promotional purposes on a local scale. For more international outreach, companies should use email campaigns, which are not only promotional but nurturing and trust-building. Besides, SendPulse offers free web push notifications to reach customers who did not interact with your emails and SMS.
Determine the objectives. Think about the results you want to achieve with promotional marketing. Set realistic targets; don’t try to satisfy the full list of your business’s goals at once.
Develop a proper promotion mix. A promotion mix is a model for creating a promotional plan based on the 5p’s: people, price, place, product, and promotion. Before you attempt to conquer new markets, think about the most critical aspect of promotion marketing — the people, and come up with a suitable promotion mix.
Come up with your promotional message. Create a message that sounds familiar and understandable for your target audience. Be humorous and trendy when you talk to younger recipients. Be formal and reliable when communicating with professionals.
Set your budget. Set your expectations for your promotion marketing budget according to your resources and find out the cost for each channel you are going to use during the promotion.
Monitor the results. Use all available tools and data to understand if your promotion is a success.

Promotional Marketing Ideas

Create a contest
Include gifts with your brand identity
Rewards card
Free shipping
Upsell
Cross-sell
Send engaging newsletters
Show video testimonials
Demonstrate your product

Create a contest. People love to take part in different kinds of lotteries, where they have a chance to win something valuable for free.
Include gifts with your brand identity. Many customers like when companies give them bags, pens, and other stuff. When people use those things in their day-to-day life, they are continually promoting your brand.
Rewards card. Offer your subscribers a discount or a free item after they make a specific number of purchases.
Free shipping. This is an effective trigger to attract your audience’s attention. Give free shipping for specific products or at a particular time of the year, for instance, on holidays.
Upsell. Offer upgrades and advanced products to people who show interest in your business.
Cross-sell. Propose additional products like headphones or phone cases if someone recently purchased a smartphone.
Send engaging newsletters. Use email marketing to help people remember you. Make newsletters exciting and relevant to your audience.
Show video testimonials. Ask your customers to leave feedback about your product or service on the socials in exchange for free coffee, for example.
Demonstrate your product. Show people how your product works, give your customers a chance to use it before buying.

Conclusion

There is a lot of money spent in the United States per year on products and products is a very important part of business expenses. Marketers know that it may be time to advertise or lower sales figures.

Promotional tools frequently get overlooked when it comes to marketing. If you’re using them, however, they could be the secret weapon that you need to get your 30-minute workday.